A few weeks ago, Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal penned a bizarre and borderline embarrassing opinion piece arguing that Apple should abandon its Mac business entirely. The reasoning? Apple should ostensibly “focus on products that represent the future.”

Perhaps appreciating the shaky foundation upon which his arguments lie, Mims’ piece begins with a plea for to readers to “indulge” him. Not surprisingly, what ultimately follows is nothing more than an exercise in absurdity.

I was reminded of Mims’ piece yesterday in light of reports that the entire PC market, save for Apple, is imploding. While every PC manufacturer on the planet is experiencing a year over year decline in growth, Apple’s Mac business is actually growing. In light of that, I thought it was worth re-visiting Mims’ piece in an effort to show why the Mac remains an ongoing, integral, and strategic part of Apple’s business and bottom line.

Apple’s foray into the world of subscription music streaming got underway earlier this week with the release of Apple Music. An ambitious effort, to say the least, Apple is betting that the allure of on-demand streaming coupled with curated playlists will be enough to attract upwards of 100 million subscribers.

The Apple Watch has been out in the wild for about two months now and, as with anything, time has seemingly softened the initial run of harsh critiques and over the top glowing reviews that accompanied its release. With the passage of time, we’ve thankfully started to see a greater number of more reasoned takes on Apple’s new wearable.

Suffice it to say, the Apple Watch isn’t as revolutionary as the iPhone, nor is it an utter disappointment a la the Newton. The truth, like most things, lies somewhere in the middle.

One of the things iOS 9 is slowly fixing is the storage issue that has prevented many users who were not familiar how iOS updates work from upgrading. Instead, they found themselves delaying the move to iOS 8 because there wasn’t enough storage space on their devices to perform over-the-air (OTA) upgrades. But Apple’s actions also seem to indicate that despite the recent move to increase double the storage on its mid-tier and high-end iPhones, the 16GB iPhone is probably here to stay. More →

Yesterday we highlighted how Vanessa Friedman, a fashion critic for The New York Times, opted to return her Apple Watch for a variety of reasons; she didn’t like that it’s highly marketed, or the fact that it looked like a gadget, or the fact that some of the Apple Watch’s advertised features didn’t always work as seamlessly as she would have hoped.

One of the business tenets that has led to Apple’s incredible success is that the company isn’t afraid to cannibalize its own products. If anything, Apple tends to embrace such scenarios, with Tim Cook once explaining that Apple views “cannibalization as a huge opportunity.”

“Our core philosophy is to never fear cannibalization,” Cook said during an earnings conference call two years ago. “If we don’t do it, someone else will. We know that iPhone has cannibalized some of our iPod business. That doesn’t worry us.”

With that said, one can only hope that Apple will take steps to actively cannibalize its own iTunes business. If they don’t, some other company will, and it may happen sooner than anyone thinks.

Not too long ago, Brian X. Chen of The New York Times wrotea piece arguing that traditional product reviews are broken insofar as they don’t often consider the varying levels of customer service different companies provide.

“The product evaluations neglect to mention the quality of a company’s customer service,” Chen writes, “which becomes the most important fact of of all when problems or questions related to the product come up.”

This is an astute point, and especially apt in regards to tech products. Not only are tech products pricey, but addressing tech oriented problems is usually beyond the expertise of most owners. As a result, if there’s any one industry where customer service should be afforded more weight when putting together a product review or stacking two rival products against one another, it’s the tech industry.

Apple’s first smartwatch is definitely impressive, but the product is far from perfect. There are many things to like and dislike about it, but there’s one thing that’ll annoy many users more and more as time goes on. More →

Ask Apple and anyone familiar with its Apple Watch launch plans and they’ll tell you the device is available for preorder beginning April 10th. Then, it should start selling in stores on April 24th. Only this time around, unlike any other highly prized Apple device, that initial release date following preorders is very misleading. In fact, it’s looking more and more like a fake release date.

Apple today is more wildly successful and popular than ever before. One might even reasonably say that Apple, for a variety of reasons, is the most influential tech company on the planet today. But sometimes, being the top dog brings with it a whole new host of problems.

The latest chapter from Apple’s “heavy is the head that wears the crown” saga is that European regulators are already looking into Apple’s discussions with record labels as it pertains to the company’s upcoming Beats streaming service. Apparently, Apple can somehow attract the attention of regulatory agencies for a service that doesn’t even officially exist yet.

Microsoft’s branding conventions have a long history of being muddled and downright confusing. Remember when Microsoft when crazy with all of its Live branding? There was Windows Live Essentials, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Sync, and who can forget about Live Mesh.

Thankfully, Microsoft, over the past few years, has improved quite a bit in this regard. Still, old habits tend to die hard, as recently evidenced by the newly unveiled Microsoft Surface 3, which one shouldn’t confuse with the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 which was released over 9 months ago.

What’s the difference between the two? What makes the Surface Pro a Pro machine, exactly? Are the two devices the same size? Who’s to say. It’s all so murky.

Yes, Apple will sell some of the most expensive smartwatches you can possibly buy this year, especially the gold Apple Watch Edition version that can cost up to $17,000. That still doesn’t mean that a) you have to buy any of these models if you can’t afford one, ir b) that Apple is wrong to price its products however it wants.

Even so, there are plenty of people who are constantly whining about how expensive the Apple Watch is and why it shouldn’t be priced so high, which is in line with similar complaints about “overpriced” Apple devices.